Last year there were warnings from crop modelers in Nature that heat kills wheat and yields were going to fall in the “near future”, if temperatures rose. In fact global warming was “already slowing wheat gains”. What followed was a record El Nino, and 2015 was the hottest ever year, with 2016 vying to beat it. But instead of wheat doom, this month the USDA forecasts a record yield of wheat with bumper crops globally. Wheat output has grown in Australia, the US, Russia, Ukraine, everywhere pretty much, except the EU where it has been too rainy. Where are the mea culpas? h/t to the GWPF
Jan 2015, published in Nature. “Global Wheat Yield May Drop as Temperatures Rise”
“… researchers are now letting farmers know that the world’s wheat yields are excepted decline in the near future, with the world standing to lose six percent of its wheat crop for every degree Celsius that the annual global temperature increases.
“The simulations with the multi-crop models showed that warming is already slowing yield gains, despite observed yield increases in the past, at a majority of wheat-growing locations across the globe,” researcher Senthold Asseng, at the University of Florida, explained in a statement.”
August 2016: USDA projects 743m ton wheat production from 2016/2017 year
USDA current August forecast is for 743 million tons, up from 734 million last year (estimated).
Looks like yet another global warming disaster:
Global Wheat Production, Forecast, 2016/2017 year. USDA. Graph.
Source: Food Security Portal with last blue bar added by me for recent USDA estimate.
September 2016: Climate chicken Littles Choke on Record Wheat Crop
Extensive planting and benign weather have forced analysts to repeatedly raise crop outlooks. The International Grains Council last week increased its global wheat production forecast to a record 743m tonnes, up 1 per cent from last year
The recent US winter wheat harvest was 45m tonnes, up 21 per cent from 2015, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Merchants who have run out of room in silos are piling wheat outdoors.
Storage concerns are also growing in Russia, which is this year set to become the largest wheat exporter after hauling in more than 70m tonnes. In Canada, the government anticipates the second-largest wheat crop in 25 years, of 30.5m tonnes. Australia’s imminent wheat harvest is forecast at 26.5m tonnes, the most in five years.
Defying not only the Club of Rome doomsayers, but also the climate Chicken Littles who have been warning about damage from rising temperatures to world agriculture, food production is booming even as meteorologists call July 2016 the hottest month ever. –– Financial Times
Australia may compete with Russia for the title of largest wheat exporter this year if the most optimistic projection below is right. If the climate cools in 2017 or soon after, how likely is it that Russia will be a record wheat exporter?
Sept 2016: Australia’s wheat crop could be in for dramatic upgrade
Australia’s wheat crop could be in for a dramatic upgrade, potentially to a record high, thanks to wet weather which has put “stellar yields” in prospect – if stoking the quality worries already live in the world market.
Forecaster Lanworth pegged the Australian wheat harvest this year at 24.3m-29.3m tonnes, with a central estimate of 27.2m tonnes, flagging “overall beneficial conditions during the growing season”.
Indeed, satellite imagery shows “record vegetation density… across nearly all major growing regions”, the analysis group said, adding that Australia was “on track for stellar yields” in wheat.
However, even Lanworth could be significantly underestimating crop potential, according to the Australian arm of crop trader Nidera – which says a record harvest could be on the agenda.
“The largest domestic wheat crop 29.6m tonnes was recorded in 2011-12 and at this point in time it is hard to see this year’s crop being under 30m tonnes,” said Peter McMeekin, origination manager at Nidera Australia.
Holy Blogmania Batman! The stories are coming out like a flood. What happened to the Weekend Unthreaded?
Anyhoo, we (as in supporters of logic) all know that crops thrive when things are warmer and wetter.
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I forgot to add that all of this reality dismays me so much, as it seems to be missed by so many reasonable people that, all I can assume, read nothing but the MSM.
A very well known US photography blog yesterday put out a post on catastrophic sea rises due to climate change and the subsequent posts (in the majority) simply supported those views. And the comment that gave me a Three Stooges moment was:
How many tipping points do we need? The world is doing well, food is aplenty, islands haven’t been swamped, storms have been in abeyance etc, yet the doomsayers just can’t let up.
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Don’t worry about sea rise, I’ve learned to type 20 metres under water
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I have actually enjoyed wine at 400 metres below sea level! Below the level of ww2 submarines. On a sunny day. Swim in the dead sea too, next to the resort. Do not try this in crocs! At 30% salt, the bouyancy holds you down. Only swim on your back. The people in the Jordan valley must be terrified of sea level rise of another meter!
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What utter nonsense. Enhanced crop production is not an outcome recognised by the IPPC or any other organisation or group of experts associated with Global Gaiantology. It has been established by experts with 97% confidence that CO2 is unrelated to plant biochemistry and its only ecological effect is to warm the planet at the concensus positive fedback ratio.
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How can the temperature be responsible for the bumper wheat crop when we know there has been a pause for the last 20 years??
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Must be more CO2 then?
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game, set, match to Bullocky. 🙂
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If only the answer was as simple as you Noddy
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sad, CS.
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Some growers who use greenhouses pump co2 into them to get up to 4 times the growth, surely they need GRANTS but they won’t get them
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Its politically incorrect to suggest dirty carbon is beneficial.
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*sigh*
The Pause was the 20 year trend line, due to ocean and solar oscillations.
The bumper year was a single hot year, due partly to the 2015/2016 El Nino.
Glad I could help.
I thought you lot knew the difference between weather and climate.
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septic just keeps LOSING every single round.
poor little septic.
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don’t know if someone has already posted
U.S. farmers forecast to produce record corn, soybean crops
The Agriculture Department forecast U.S. corn production to total a record 15.2 billion bushels, while the soybean crop is expected to come in at a record 4.06 billion bushels. Wheat production is forecast at 2.32 billion bushels, up 13% from 2015.
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Beware corn will increase temperature and may need to be cut back
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You forgot to add increased CO2 to the end of your last sentence to make it ‘warmer, wetter and have increased CO2’.
That will make the doomsayers very upset.
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When will these people learn?
One should never, ever, make predictions.
Especially predictions about the future.
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and the only way they can make predictions about the past is by changing the real data. !!!
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Al Gore has hade so many dud predictions especially about Arctic melting away and polar bears yet he still has followers
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So extra sunlight, water and CO2 = less crop growth? hmmmmmm….methinks not many farmers inhabit the halls of Nature.
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Nor any scientist who understands these are the three ingredients of photosynthesis.
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So true Yonnie. Climastrology has got everything exactly backwards to ensure continuing funding and prestige via instilled fear and natural ignorance of the taxpayers.
Warmer and wetter is the way to go as evidenced in the deep past, such as Gondwanaland if I’m right. I need to find my remote to turn up the Sun a notch and rejigger the Earth’s orbit. Probably move some continents around as well.
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Sorta gives a whole (meal) new meaning to that ancient Roman phrase bread and circuses, eh!
Tony.
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Only this year, the politics ….. ARE the circuses!
Tony
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I wonder if the wheat crop is shorter on flavour than previous crops due to bulking out of sugars, starches and cellulose with the greater amount of carbon available?
Rereke Whakaaro mentioned that effect with the produce from a friend’s greenhouse but grain may be different.
The weekend has been lost 🙁
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There might be more of it, but, as you suggest, it is the wrong sort of wheat! It is full of bad stuff, releases CO2 when you bake it, and produces more methane when you digest it.
Or something.
It is a Bad Thing. We’re doomed.
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If you wan’t flavour you should try making some sourdough bread with some whole grain flour! I make it once a week!
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Potato bread makes da bestus toast! 🙂
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.
Analitik @ #4
That research on the effects of elevated CO2 on wheat and other crops in an open field environment is being done only a few kilometres from where I live in Horsham in west Vic.
The project, the only one presently in the Southern Hemisphere on grain crops is called AG FACE; [ Free Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment Array ], a series of rings of tubes through which carbon dioxide is continually released according to the output of sensors indicating wind directions and speeds and water vapour content and etc within the ring so as to maintain a fairly constant and selected concentration of CO2 over the growing crop inside of the ring regardless of wind, heat, water and etc conditions, all under open air, open field conditions.
The crop within the ring[ s] is under the selected CO2 concentration right from when it is sown to some months later when it has matured and is harvested to test the varieties grain quality and baking and stock feed qualities in the laboratories at the Crops Research Centre here in Horsham .
Not all of the current varieties of wheat [ and similar effects in other crop types,] respond in the same way to elevated CO2.
A couple of older varieties actually showed a very small decrease in yield.
Others responded very significantly to increased CO2 in foliage growth, much higher water use efficiency, increased yields, better use of nitrogen and fertilizers but most also show a usually small decrease in grain quality.
A year or so ago one of the big Sydney MSM’ papers did an article on Horsham’s AGFACE research and showed a photo of a very small quite distorted few centimeters long loaf of bread made from one of the wheat varieties that had been grown in one the enhanced CO2 rings.
Anthony Watts put the article up on WUWT where the supposed open minded skeptics went ballistic in tearing the whole AGFACE research apart.
Their ignorance and even more so, their refusal to try and learn about how one of mankind’s most basic foods is researched for growth and quality under natural and expected conditions and then tested and finally produced in this case was both astonishing and appalling.
Not all of them but most of them knew it all without having a clue as to the dozens of different quality tests that are done for quality on any new varieties that manage to get past the Breeder’s own field selection processes that also involve all the dozens of growth characteristics and responses to all the fertilizer and temperature responses, water use and etc and etc that every growing and maturing plant goes through during its annual growth cycle.
Each breeder field selected variety is subject to a baking test as soon as there is enough grain from the few plants to do a micro milling and baking process. Which means that during testing in the baking Labs there will be dozens or hundreds of these 6 or 7 centimetre long loaves being assessed for all the dozens of quality and baking characteristics demanded by the modern factory type bread product industry .
It was one of those very small preliminary baking test loaves that was shown by the MSM and which Anthony posted up on WUWT.
A number of the WUWT mob scathingly claimed they could easily bake and had done so regularly, a far superior loaf of bread to compared to that miserable specimen.
Of course the true irony of their claims completely escaped them.
They were using flour from wheats that had been thoroughly tested for every baking and quality process possible in exactly the same process they were so vigorously condemning, so as to achieve the best varieties most suitable for making the bread they claimed they were so much better at making than that small test loaf which was randomly selected to be photographed and was probably from some selected wheat plants out of hundreds being tested for baking qualities but which the parent plant of the miniature bread loaf was probably going to be thrown out for not meeting the required quality and processing and milling standards.
I then got a pasting here on Jo’s blog when I raised the point of the ignorance of the WUWT mob on the processes that are part, parcel and fundamental to producing the quality of the base agricultural products needed to produce the quality foods we expect to purchase and consume every day of our lives.
Perhaps these days I have got a bit of glow about the more recent commenters here on Jo’s blog but I often get the feeling these days, particularly after the WUWT fiasco, that the quality of the comments and the whole quite incredible range of information on a whole host of subjects that is being made available through the wide knowledge and perceptions of Jo’s commenters has gone through a quite steep upward in quality curve in the time I have been looking, lurking and maybe a bit of low level contributing to Jo’s blog.
Some reading matter on the AGFACE project and the results of enhanced CO2 on the current wheat varieties.
Explaining AGFACE; Transcript: National Wheat FACE array; Dr Glenn Fitzgerald [ Glen is a darn good agricultural scientist.
.
Archive for the category: Crop Response to CO2
Google “AGFACE array at Horsham” for a number of articles on this now a decade or more running CO2 / crop experiment and some pics of the 8 or so enhanced CO2 ring arrays.
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Yep. The respose to that post on WUWT was the last straw for me.
I now never visit WUWT, unless a post there is linked to from a blog I respect.
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Egads! They’re poisoning the biosphere!!
Great post with lots of useful info, ROM.
I fully agree that sceptics should be mindful of their own limits to avoid confirmation bias, even when trying to debunk MSM myths.
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In the US, the wheat actually grew too much for the level of fertilizer used and reduced the protein content. So we’ve got lots of grain, but it’s low on protein. http://cropwatch.unl.edu/2016/nebraska-2016-wheat-%E2%80%93-high-yields-low-protein
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Thanks for the info. I was expecting that sort of effect but it was only a supposition (thought experiment) on my part.
It would have been good for the US ethanol fuel industry if corn reacted similarly but it seems not from this paper that I found.
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/16435/How%20Will%20All%20That%20Extra%20CO2%20Affect%20Crops.pdf?sequence=2
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I’ve moved this post to try to find the Unthreaded. So comment at the new spot!
UPDATE: Sorted now. This post is fine. Unthreaded is back. – Jo
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Did it leave before Parliament rose? Lucky it didn’t get on the plane.
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Gee Aye, What are you on about?
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He is talking about the unthreaded thread, and Parliament rising, and planes taking off, or not.
I take it, that you didn’t get the memo either?
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Memo? What Memo? We’re skeptics and not supposed to believe anything in a memo. So nobody writes them and there wasn’t one to get. 😉
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It was all to do with our great leader being caught with his pants down in clear view, not having the numbers in the house to pass a bill.
Hope that makes sense.
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Good rains last week in NW & CW NSW.Follow up in October and all is Roses for wheat.Bad scenario:too much rain through the Spring,which will downgrade the quality .The other determinate is a flooded market of another kind.
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WA is looking at a bumper crop too.
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The leftists will be frantic to combat the emerging stories about Sugar Cane farmers in Queensland now growing Rice as the alternative crop, and without needing to drown the crop in water.
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http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2016/s4406074.htm
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Thanks for the link, Dennis. As an agricultural scientist I love to hear of innovation and foresight such as this. It just goes to show, no matter what nature throws at us, man can innovate and adapt and has the native resources to do so. And, did you note, the “govanment” had nothing to do with it, nor should they!
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Peter
Seems to me to make more sense if you think of “government enthusiasms” as “government wisdom” is only adding to the list of oxymorons
20
Very interesting Dennis.
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Aww.. What will the sugar cane beetle eat now? Not to mention the decline in cane toads..
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Come on Jo, can’t you see the disaster this creates? More food, healthier people, more procreation, more consumption of resources. We need more disasters – floods, droughts, famines, to bring the world back to its pre-industrial state. /sarc
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Actually Robber makes a good point. If there is more food, we can expect more obesity. Everybody panic!
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Another wrong forecast? Have these computer models and experts ever been right?
Ex Australian Climate Commissioner was quoted in the Australian this morning as stating that we will be getting more storms.
I have never understood that if the CO2 effect, the greenhouse gas effect could not increase the temperature, how it could possibly affect whether we have more storms or worse storms. Where do people pull such statements with such certainty from models which cannot predict or explain El Nino or La Nina, the biggest climate events on the planet? How can they always fall back onto things which are not explained to justify the value of their models and that underneath the facts, they are actually right?
Yes, I was wrong, but underneath every flooding rain is a long drought? That would explain it. A drought then never ends.
Also I do not understand that self proclaimed Anthropocene experts like Steffen can argue that their beloved ‘Anthropocene’ started say from the atom bomb blasts in 1965 or so? Didn’t WW2 happen? Or the next ten years?
At what point do we say these experts are completely incompetent?
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“At what point do we say these experts are completely incompetent?”
Hansen’s first warming predictions based on CO2 were in the early – mid 1980’s, iirc.
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Hansen 1984. I still cite it.
But likely it was the Charney Report 1978 or so where the assumption about relative humidity was wrong, and the strange idea that increasing the incoming sun was the same as blocking the outgoing.
Also I suspect that’s the start of the idea that feedbacks up in the atmosphere work through the surface ONLY (and that there are no feedbacks in the atmosphere to actual warming in the atmosphere) was bound to muck up every model built since then….
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Remember, this is the industrial chemist PhD who announced that we had twice as much solar energy incident over a year in Victoria to provide all our energy needs, without realizing that we would have to cover half the state with solar panels. The cost runs out of zeros. Then where would we live with half the state in darkness forever? With public genius like this on display, PhDs get a bad name.
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Dr. Will Steffen. Climate Commission and now Climate Council scientist. Latter day climatologist with no meteorological training. Zag to Flannery’s Zig.
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… and now Climate Council zeitgeist.
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Zig and Zag a couple of clowns reputations ruined by unethical tampering……how ambient.
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And to make that as reliable as Coal power you would hove to overbuild by 5 times, meaning that you need solar panels covering an area 2.5 times Victoria – Will Steffan is math challenged. I bailed him up at the Ipswich Climate conversation – he can’t handle the truth or the math.
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“overbuild by 5 times”
And connected to a battery the size of Lake Baikal. Something AU lacks, I think.
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TdeF: These experts have ALWAYS been completely incompetent, viz.
1. Flim Flam’s prediction that dams in the Eastern states would never be full again
2. Computer models of future temperature rises that failed to predict a PAUSE in average global temperatures
3. Peak Oil production around about 2012 with rapid decline after that, particularly in the USA
4. Total disappearance the Arctic ice sheet by about 2005, sorry, 2015.
5. Hansen’s prediction that Manhattan would be under water by 2005.
6. Club of Rome predictions about impending commodity shortages
7. Predictions of massive starvation in Africa and Asia by the 1980’s.
WOEFUL INCOMPETENCE
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A short memory is a wonderful soporific for the conscience. The latter word being a contraction of the abbreviation “con”, for confidence trick, and the word “science”, being the mythical study of nature.
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When assessing whether or not these folks were competent, it depends critically on what you assume their objectives were.
It’s pretty clear that their objectives were not to produce accurate forecasting models. It was to furnish a pseudo-scientific justification for a planned government taxation of energy consumption (and at an individual level finding a low-effort sinecure that was lucrative enough to pay the mortgage and the kids’ school fees… although they should not be reproducing if they care about ‘carbon footprints’).
As to examples of wrong predictions, it’s sad that few people remember the 1980 bet made between Paul ‘ZOMFG Population Bomb We’re All Dead’ Erlich and Julian ‘Mathusians are Idiots’ Simon. That bet showed a number of really interesting points: the key one was that Erlich had no idea about mean-reversion or tech change, and extrapolated price trends quasi-linearly.
In other words, Erlich’s underlying assumption was that as resources became depleted, production processes would not respond by (attempting to) switch away from the relatively-more-expensive material in favour of alternatives.
That’s right: Erlich implicitly assumed static technology for the foreseeable future.
Don’t let him off the hook because he existed in the pre-computer era – in those days the now obvious double-exponential growth of technology was not obvious in the data, but even back then the best approximation for the growth path of technology at the time was (slightly) more-than-linear. Harrod’s main work on tech change happened in the 1930s (as did Hicks’); Solow’s main work was from the 1950s – and all of them found compelling evidence of sustained, exponential, economy-wide productivity growth (which is the absolute essence of technological progress).
Even Leontief’s “fixed proportions” production function included technological parameters that would be time-dependent in dynamic input-output models (one of the most ignorant libels about IO modelling is that it assumed technological constancy – absolutely untrue).
A competent technical economist – one that has excellent training in statistics and econometrics – knows enough about the pitfalls of forecasting to be very circumspect about making overly-declarative pronouncements about forecasts.
That would also be true of a technically-competent climate ‘scientist’ – but in 20 years of looking at the output of the field, I have found no evidence that there is such a thing.
/rant
00
“Another wrong forecast? Have these computer models and experts ever been right?”
I keep asking that, but all I get is an embarrassed shuffling of feet and avoidance of meeting my eye. Surely they must have got something right once, if only by accident.
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The climate models were asked the ultimate question, “What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?” The answer was, “A large pepperoni pizza, with fries and garlic mayo”.
That sounds as sensible to me, as any other prediction that the climate models may, or may not, have made.
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TdeF asked:
Nope. Why else would a learned judge (w-a-a-a-y back in the 19th Century) state:
There are liars, damned liars and experts! which later morphed into lies, damned lies, and statistics.
With a record harvest, there’s another thing we can expect: a rodent (mouse) population boom. Plagues of ’em.
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Rats are OK. But I don’t like mice, there is no meat on them.
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So get a Cat! Shadow presents them for inspection, just before dinner. Chipmunks and birds are good too! Tax on canned catfood is higher than that on beer! 🙂
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The plagues of mice of the days not so long past are coming to an end with the field use and application and use of Zinc Phosphide on sterilised grain.
The Zinc phosphide is applied through small applicators usually mounted on the back of the farm ute which throws the grain at a kilogram a hectare across 20 or 30 metre wide strip in the paddocks.
Spreading in strips in a paddock at a rate of a kilogram / Hectare which will kill about 20,000 mice, [ I only used a half a kilogram/ Ha and got nearly 100% control but had to resow as the emerged crop was destroyed by the mice numbers ] can be done at 20 kph or more when the applicator is set up correctly so it doesn’t take long to do over a paddock that is beginning to get a lot of mice in it according to the test strips which the mice love to chew on, that are put out and / or a hole count by walking in a straight line for a couple of hundred metres and counting the holes in a strip along the walk.
The mice eat the treated and sterilized grain, sterilized to stop it growing in the upcoming or next crop, and then the mouse’s stomach acids break down the and activate the Zinc phosphide leading the the death of the mouse from phosphene gas poisoning
Death is usually by then down in its hole which will be packed with maybe 50 or a hundred plague mice in the one chamber a foot or so down in our soils.
For those who have some trouble handling the fact that those dear little creatures are being killed then i suggest you Google ” Mouse plague videos” or “Australian mouse plagues” and get educated about plague mice.
The couple of items missing in these videos is the nauseating stench that pervades everything for weeks on end during a plague and the constant squeaking of mice every where and in everything.
And then the stomach churning climax at the end of a full blown plague as the mice desperate for protein begin to cannabilise one another.
Then the sickening sight of numbers of sick, dying, half eaten stinking mice trying to drag themselves across the ground in any direction.
A few days later after this and it is all over except for the stench of millions of decaying mouse carcasses,
Been there and done that a few too many times in my life unfortunately.
So we love the Zinc Phosphide which it self can be quite deadly if seriously misused and not respected to the utmost by the person doing the application for which we must have attended a short course and be licensed.
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Wow, so they gas their own hole, taking out their family? That’s an extremely elegant distribution method and I imagine it helps the long term fertility of the soil. I can fully understand the precautions required for usage, though – I wouldn’t want to go near the stuff without full training.
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Apologies Analitik as I gave a wrong impression there on the effects of the phosphene gas poisoned mice having on other mice in their hole.
The individual mice who have eaten even a small part of the treated grain will die in a few minutes from phosphene gas poisoning.
They usually make it to their hole, they are quite territorial re holes, before dying so you see very little evidence of any dead ones in a treated field.
In a plague or close to plague mice situation those holes will have a chamber anywhere from a few tens of centimetres to a metre or more down in cracking clay soils as ours are here, which will contain anywhere from 20 or so to a close to a hundred or so mice all packed in a ball inside of that chamber.
The mice seem to be able to go into a semi suspended animation state with a temporary and much lower metabolic rate and therefore low oxygen requirements inside of that chamber of packed mice.
The mice who have consumed the poisoned grain probably retain most of the very small amounts of phosphene gas within their bodies but this is only a surmising on my part as I have never seen any research on this aspect of the phosphene gas use on mice.
Much research was understandably done by the various Ag and Animal laboratories and researchers on the use of Zinc Phosphide for mice control particularly concerning any effects on other wild life such as birds and etc before the release of this method of mouse control a decade ago now. and following the last serious mouse plague in Victoria’s grain belt when the only few means of some sort of control of mice were eliminated by the Melbourne based bureaucrats as too dangerous to other wild life.
Farmers and farmer’s interests in just trying to make a living and control a serious introduced pest species were’nt of any consideration to those bureaucrats at least until the uproar penetrated to the politicians who reacted by telling everybody to get off their a**es and fast and and find a fix for the mouse problem.
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Thanks again for the clarification, ROM.
Just for my personal interest, is this the stuff? http://www.animalcontrol.com.au/mouse-baits1.htm
20
Yes!
This commercial product came onto the market just after I had left the farming game but I used and spread the identical Zinc Phosphide product myself as acquired through a Vic. Dept of Ag mouse baiting program when the Zinc Phosphide mouse baiting was still somewhat under development when we had a localised mouse plague over some of my paddocks in the early and mid 1990’s.
The Zinc Phosphide breaks down on the grains in a few days of exposure in the paddocks if not eaten by mice.
The Zinc Phosphide coated grains that the farmers spread for mice control are coloured a strong blue as research has shown that birds will go to considerable lengths to avoid the blue coloured grain in the paddocks.
The safety of the product has come quite a long way since, I think, it was first used in the 1990’s here in the Victorian grain belt.
And there are strong restrictions on when and how it is used so you can’t just go out and start spreading the stuff around willy nilly when ever you might think it is a good idea.
50
Thanks ROM, that is very interesting.
Can you enlarge on that for mouse control at grain storage and grain processors (millers)? Would it be similar baits and baiting?
10
sophocles @ # 9.5.2.2
Mice and rats can only access the surface grain when it is in a stack / heap so one technique I have seen witha bad mouse problem in one of the more or less open grain storage sheds was to scrape off the first 5 or so centimetres of grain on the entire surface of the stack before the stack was loaded to go to the grain processing plants.
The scraped off and mouse contaminated grain was and is sent to the stock feed processors to be turned into chook and animal feed pellets .
In the big round steel silos both the grain processors with the Big many thousands of tonnes capacity silos and farmers 100 to 500 tonne silos, the grain silos are usually sealed very closely for grain insect control so mice and rats just can’t and very rarely manage to get into such a silo usually through some hatch or small door being left open when filing the silo with grain.
The big tarpaulin covered stacks you now see at many central grain collection points where tens of thousands of tonnes of various grains are stored under those almost airtight tarps don’t really allow the mice much in the way of access to the grain in the stacks.
And there is a baiting program going on around those premises if there is a mouse problem which is obviously carefully controlled and not discussed much at all so as to not frighten the often “paranoid” [ ? ] for price reducing reasons overseas customers of any grain from out of that premises.
The grain froma big storage system is often specified to come from a specific storage centre by a customer who requires a precise quality of grain for say noodles or flour or starch or CousCous or the dozens and hundreds of other grain based food and industrial products .
All grain in every truckload that goes into the storage and processing system anywhere is sampled before delivery including grain out of farmers silos to merchants later in the year is tested for a whole range of qualities to make sure it is suitable for the purposes for which it is being purchased.
The real problem with grain storages and that includes lentils.peas , beans , canola, wheat , barley, oats, sunflower, and etc and etc , everything you see on those super market shelves , is grain insect pests such as weevils and grain borers and etc all of which in any numbers at all can be quite devastating inside of a stack of grain or inside of a silo.
So silos are sealed and phosphene gas is introduced at the top by throwing a few pellets, that dissolve over some hours into phosphine gas, into the grain at the top of the silos where being heavier than air, the gas drifts down through the silo and / or stack and hopefully kills the insects.
The grain insects are becoming tolerant of these deadly gasses and they are dangerous to use plus a lot of purchasers of grain are now banning any grain that has been treated by the gas as they get a bit excited when an old undissolved pellet turns up in the grain when it is being cleaned prior to processing.
In the big tarpaulin covered stacks the use of phosphine tablets and gassing the stack is about the only method that works.
A worker climbs to the top of the ridge of the long stack and puts a slit in the tarp where a porous but substantial bag holding the phosphine gas pellets or powder is inserted into the slit and the slit promptly closed over and sealed.
This is repeated at regular intervals along the ridge of each grain stack.
The gas then takes days to percolate slowly down through the grain killing any insects as it does so.
The porous bags with the remnants of the pellets is retrieved when the grain in the stack is being loaded onto the trains or trucks for transporting to the merchants and processing works or for shipment overseas.
So along with an amorphous silica power introduced into the grain during the filling of the silo , amorphous silica having very fine, very sharp edges and spikes on each micron sized particle which gets into the joints in the insects hard shelled outer casing and destroys the membranes in there that keep the insects moisture levels at the right levels and so kills the insect.
Again merchants are not enamoured with grain that has trace amounts of such a powder in it.
So we are now using sealed silos with automatic aeration systems that switch on and pump air through the grain in the silos when air temperatures are below 15C and the air moisture levels are low enough, 15C being a temperature below which grain insects become comatose and therefore cannot breed and multiply and destroy the grain once the grain in the silo has been cooled down below that critical 15 C temperature through the aeration process..
The advantages of aeration for insect control are quite marked, no chemicals or silica residues in the grain and grain quality deterioration is reduced quite dramatically due to the maintenance of the colder temperatures leading to a much better quality grain in both quality and appearance after some months of storage compared to un-aerated grain.
Mobile and large capacity Refrigeration units are sometimes used in commercial premises to rapidly cool down the grain to below that critical 15 C temperature required to maintain insect free grain quality.
Some Grain storage information to contemplate while you eat those cereal wheaties or eat that cake or those biscuits.
Insect Control in Stored Grain
50
…ahem…
130
Next he’ll be cutting off tails with a carving knife….monster!
90
🙂
70
‘…except the EU where it has been too rainy.’
A regional cooling signal.
70
Across the gap our cousins are having a bumper crop of kiwifruit.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/the-country/news/article.cfm?c_id=16&objectid=11681573
80
Chinese Gooseberries?
Originally discovered in the Chang Kiang Valley of China, kiwifruit was considered a delicacy by the great Khans who relished its emerald green color and dazzling flavor. By the mid 1800s, the fruit had found its way into other countries which nicknamed it Chinese gooseberry, and it wasn’t long before New Zealand growers were exporting the exotic fruit to specialized markets around the world.
Still extra CO2 will do that. China allegedly produces the extra CO2 and the Kiwis grow the extra fruit. Exports both ways. Sure beats a carbon tax.
172
And for some unknown reason, we have a bumper crop of avocado. I am seriously in danger of getting nacho’ed out!
91
Too many Greens.
61
May need to change your screen name to Rereke Gwakamole.
71
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-04/wa's-mid-west-awash-with-colour-with-the-best-wildflower-seas/7811986
80
LOL. The flowers are growing in their millions and millions. Actually I wish I could be there to see it.
I am driving to Lake Keepit in a few days. Maybe there will be some windflowers in NSW as well.
41
I am heading to WA start of October to tour as far as Broome mainly to see the wildflower displays that appear irregularly.
51
Just for information, wheat is harvested somewhere around the world during every month of the year so the anticipated global production figures plus usage figures plus carryover stocks is updated every month at a minimum but usually every week as we see in monthly updates in the last two lists of production figures in the table below.
Most grain is consumed in the countries where it is grown and the actual export figures although mind boggling tonnage wise are only about a seventh of what is produced
One of my regular Go-To sites when I was in farming was the International Grains Council’s forecast production, usage and carryover tonnage data.
So what is the IGC saying this last week about global grain production;
Grain Market Report;
GMR 469 – 25 August 2016
OVERVIEW
After a further upward revision, grains production in 2016/17 is forecast at an all-time peak.
An increase for feed accounts for half of the projected growth in grains demand.
Global grains stocks will rise for a fourth successive year.
World soyabean output is tentatively seen at a fresh record on bumper crops in leading producers, namely the US and Brazil.
The 2016/17 global rice outturn could be the biggest on record assuming weather conditions are favourable in Asia.
———–
WORLD ESTIMATES [ Total all grains ]
[million tons ]; 2013/14 … 2014/15 … 2015/16 … 28.07.16 ….25.08.16
Production; …… .. 2008 ——- —2047 ——–2000 ——–2046—— —–2069
Trade…………………… 310——- —–322——- —-343———-324———– 330
Consumption;……. 1935——- -2008——– 1982——— 2029—– —-2046
Carryover stocks; .. 412 ———-451 ———-469 ———-488———– 492
year/year change…… 73——— —39————- 18 ——————————23 [ all plus; ie; increases in production ]
Major exporters b)… 121 ——–146——— 145——— 163——- ——-164 [ exports by Argentina, Australia, Canada, EU, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, US ]
————–
Again to emphasis; The table above, one of a number of tables for each grain product in the IGC marketing report is for all grain production globally.
It is what the world ‘s 7.5 billions of humanity relies to live on and to survive year in and year out, decade after decade.
.
For grain farmers worldwide those increasing grain production figures are an economic disaster.
Eg; In the wheat quota years of 1968 to about 1970 when there was a huge excess of wheat in the world and we growers here in Australia were limited in the amount of wheat we were allowed to deliver to the already overflowing storage system.
The rock bottom prices for a tonne of wheat delivered across the state border [ constitutional free trade between states upheld by the High Court ] we received around $45 a tonne.
About $65 / tonne was the supposed official price for wheat delivered to the storages under the delivery quota system.
Using the ABS’s Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator we enter $45 for the Dec 1968; and the equivalent price today of that extremely low price of Dec 1968 would be $531 / tonne. in June 2016.
.
In 1970 we received $90/ tonne as the global grain glut disappeared.
And that in today’s money, ,June 2016, is the equivalent is $977 / tonne after inflation is calculated over those near half a century.
.
In 1974 a world grain shortage developed and wheat went to the extraordinary price of over $150 / tonne, about one and half times the average weekly wages of the time.
The equivalent price today would be $1108 / tonne of wheat.
.
As of today the grain farmers are being offered $190 to $210 / tonne
So all those who so vociferously condemn farmers for one thing or another or just about everything should perhaps for starters, try living on the same monetary wages that was current in the mid 1970’s of around a couple of hundred dollars per week.
Around 1500 plus loaves of bread can be produced from a tonne of wheat.
Thanks for the bigger picture ROM. – Jo
271
This old piece of wisdom which I first came across some decades ago seems to have been carefully forgotten by the climate alarmist science establishment.
And it is becoming a truly classic case of re-inventing the wheel, the reinvention of this particular wheel that low periods of solar activity ie low sunspot numbers, are cloudier periods is now taking some hundreds of billions of dollars to re-invent in modern science versus those old scientists who relied on observation and data and not much money at all to gain their insights.
Nature 2003;
Sun set food prices in the Middle Ages
Changes in solar activity sent wheat prices soaring in medieval England
[ quoted from the illustration in the article ; Low solar activity equals cloudy skies and poor crops.P. Brueghel (1565]
141
Do note this has been observed before several times. That article about the Israeli guys even included reference to prior art:
The new findings will help to burnish some tarnished reputations. When the British astronomer William Herschel suggested a link between sunspots and wheat prices in 1801, he met such ridicule that he had to cancel lectures on the topic.
And towards the end of the nineteenth century William Stanley Jevons, one of the main architects of conventional economic theory, proposed the same idea as an explanation for the recurring booms and slumps in the economy.
Jevons claimed that high prices and stock-market panic seemed to recur on the same 10-11-year timescale as sunspots. He reasoned that fluctuating solar activity could affect weather and therefore harvests.
91
I seem to recall that the ancient Egyptians set tax rates by using the height of the Nile floods as an indicator of the upcoming crop yield. They managed to build and maintain a long lasting civilisation despite a sub-par crop every 5-ish years on average, either from too much flooding, or not enough.
One day the Greens might discover that the world has never been static, and unchanging, and that it has never been a friendly, utopian, egalitarian place to live. Of course, by that time, pigs may well be flying a great deal.
131
ROM
After that I have to make sure you appreciate the “wellbeing from experience” referred to in
Comment 3.1.1.1.2 at
http://joannenova.com.au/2016/09/weekend-unthreaded-132/
31
Maybe the Wimmera farmers could use their surplus grain to grow some rack of lamb, which costs about $40/kg in our supermarket.
41
Peter C @ 13.3
About 36% of the world’s grain crop is used as animal feed.
Consequently there is very little chance of there being a global human consumption quality grain shortage in the foreseeable future as the acreages now used for animal feed production could and would be switched over in a single season to a better paying human consumtion quality grain production.
I have been guilty many times of suggesting that a world food shortage could develop but hadn’t realised this 36% grain for animal feed factor and the amount of grain used in animal feeding for meat and other animal products production.
Of course with animal quality feed grains then being in short supply and no replacement grain stocks available for animal feed in the feed lots where most of it is used, meat would likely become a true luxury item as it would be far more limited in quantity as it would have to be mostly grassland and range fed originated animal products.
The old saying in agriculture is; The cure for high prices is high prices ie; farmers if a the price is high for an agricultural product will quickly switch into producing that high priced product thereby increasing its supply and in doing so, bring the price of the product down again.
There are two possible scenarios that could lead to a global food shortage of some duration;
The first and most unlikely scenario is for a Toba scale explosive volcanic eruption allied with a cold quiet Sun cycle and therefore a couple of years of intense cold with no summer growing season.
There would possibly be a quarter of mankind that would perish in this situation from the blanketing effects of the ash fallout and the reduction and absence in many parts of the world close to the eruption of any food production and food supplies.
However the grain reserves in storage would if their consumption was carefully controlled could sustain human kind for at least a year giving some time for mankind to get back onto his feet and get food production up and running again albeit at a very much reduced level initially.
The second scenario and a more likely one and a very subtle one as it would just creep up on humanity is the potential for the arrant stupidity and outright and utter ignorance of the inner city , concrete jungle, latte sipping greens and the equally arrogant, know it all MSM and their equally ignorant fellow city based academic elites to try and restrict and even eliminate the food producer’s access to cheap always there fossil fuel energy sources.
A couple of decades ago in the 1980’s a couple of US Universities did a study on the energy used in grain growing in this case.
From the mining of the ores for the machinery and fertilizers, through the growing, harvesting, transporting and processing of the grain to the products that finished up on the plate of the hungry consumer, it was calculated that the energy in that plate of food was about equal to the energy used from fossil fuels to produce that plate of food.
So if we ever see the promoters of pure unmitigated arrant ignorance about food production from the concrete jungles and who are thoroughly bigoted against agriculture, such as the inner city greens and assorted hard left anti farmer academic elites, if they ever gain the power to restrict in any way the access of the world’s food producers to cheap and almost unlimited energy sources, then the world will really see sustained hunger until sense again prevails and agriculture and its food production can again gear up over an period perhaps of years, to once again produce enough food to sustain our human populations.
80
ROM
You are right in saying most us forget that most primary produce production is consumed in the country of production. I’m currently in China and was told about their wheat production. Ignorant me didn’t realise they produced wheat. Looking up Wikipedia I see they produce about 125 million tonnes per year –double the next highest and puts Australia’s production in perspective. It is the same as NZ milk production –we are the biggest exporters of dairy products but our total milk production is relatively low on a global basis.
31
Silos in big demand as bumper crops dampen prices.
http://www.northerndailyleader.com.au/story/4137615/bumper-crops-drive-silo-sales/?cs=5346
70
Bottom line is, under the current continental configuration, (which isn’t going to change much anytime soon), most land is in the northern hemisphere and most of this land isn’t actually optimally located with regards to wheat and other crop growing (most of this land is a little too cold and a little too far north). This means the warmer it gets, the more production you generally get.
Generally speaking, and in multiple different ways, under the current continental arrangement the warmer it is, generally the better it is, for plants/animals and humans alike. (Ice ages don’t exactly mean greater crop production).
This has somehow been missed by the climate establishment.
Australia is a little different, it was generally wetter when the continent was further south, and was able to accommodate a greater variety of species, within different ecosystems. Australia has been getting slowly drier over at least the last 25 millions of years, if the continent gets a little warmer it is not entirely clear what this will mean, as it currently sits largely within desert and semi desert producing rainfall and temperature patterns.
For Africa there is strong evidence that when just a little warmer the Sahara desert was much smaller and wetter, so northern Africa at least would be expected to get wetter and be better for farming under a slightly warmer world, which one also doesn’t often hear from the climate establishment. Other continents and regions have variable patterns.
111
Lake sediment proxies show Australia had a more stable and wetter climate during the SH holocene peak 10,000 years ago. Indeed the ENSO cycle that dives the extreme variability of australian weather is associated with a cold climate based on hydrology studies of sediments on either side of the pacific.
Just some more evidence that our alarmist ignore.
70
In cooler times (LIA) more La Nina and less El Nino presumably made Australia wetter.
11
In the Pilbara region of north-west Australia there were huge floods during the Dark Age Period from around 100-700 AD, which may relate to a positive Indian Ocean Dipole.
10
That should be a ‘negative’ IOD makes central and eastern Australia wetter.
10
Damn! Oh well, maybe we will have a famine next year.
Hang in there Al, Mike, Will, Tim, Leonardo…
60
‘ The simulations with the multi- crop models showed
that warming is already slowing crop yields …’ LOL.
Take a look, modellers, at the records , non-simulated data,
there’s 1816, the Year Without a Summer, year of crop failure,
and there’s those other Little Ice Age famines that Lamb, 1966,
pointed out with swings in growing season from warmest to coldest
times. (price of wheat and rye, respectively, in various European countries during the LIA.)
100
The simulations with the multi-
cropcrap models showed that…There, fixed it.
30
The doom-laden warmist elite,
Were wrong when they forecast that heat,
Would increase as expected,
Was nowhere detected,
In a bumper year worldwide for wheat.
171
A possible record wheat crop, and while, at the same time, a possibly record number of people are discovering the health benefits of a wheat free diet. It’s probably a bit early in the day to be feeling so paradoxicated.
12
Interesting bit of reality avoidance psychology there;
If they don’t eat wheat they will have to eat something else grown by farmers/ food producers somewhere as a replacement for those grain based food stuffs.
And what they eat will invariably contain one of the dozen or so main crop, pulse and root crop species on this planet, all of which are grown almost exclusively by farmers and food producers.
50
Ah but (sarc warning) don’t forget if we let the world warm up by 2 degrees the consequences will be disastrous.
It’s time now to challenge the 2 degree nonsense while all the other nonsense is on the ropes. There’s no science whatever that supports the 2 degree target, and even less to support the new 1.5 degree target. The 1.5 degree target is a panic reaction by the warmists and needs to be called out.
61
The scare was easy. 0.5C in ten years, so 5C in 100 years. Then after 20 further years with no heating, 0.5 in thirty years so 1.66C in the next 70. At what point do people question the 0.5C in ten years? This was instrumentation change, nothing more.
81
As for 0.8C since 1900 to 1980, most of the world had no measurements at all in 1900. Thermometers were as rare as hens teeth and man had not been to the poles or to Everest. This is made up, extrapolated data. Scientific nonsense posing as real data.
61
Jo
FYI
“Number of the Week: Up 18.6%. The web site, Climate Change Predictions.org reports on a 2005 two-day international discussion meeting held by the Royal Society entitled “Food Crops in a Changing Climate”, which was partially organized by the University of Reading. A press release announced the grim findings that, in-spite of carbon dioxide fertilization, climate change will cause yields of maize, rice, soybean and wheat to decline by as much as 20%. According to the World Bank, the average yield in cereals in 2005 was 3280 kg per hectare, in 2014 (the last year data is available) the yield was 3890 kg per hectare, an increase of 18.6%. See links under Below the Bottom Line and http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG.”
From
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/04/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-239/
61
O/T – telling it like it really is on green jobs!
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2016/09/wynneing-47.html#comments\
and link
21
more good news. pics plus gallery at the bottom of the article:
4 Sept: ABC: Wildflower season leaves WA Mid West awash with colour
By Sarah Taillier
Geraldton-based biologist Wendy Payne said consistent rainfall had brought the region back to life.
Geraldton, 400 kilometres north of Perth, has already received above average annual rainfall.
“We’ve had this amazing water falling from the sky this year, we’d almost forgotten what it was like,” she said.
“I don’t think we’ve managed to get an average rainfall in the last 15 years, so the plants are just rejoicing in all the rain.”…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-04/wa's-mid-west-awash-with-colour-with-the-best-wildflower-seas/7811986
81
oops…just noticed Dennis posted the WA wildflower link already.
21
To both of you: Thanks.
Here is a link from 2012.
http://www.jammychicken.com/2012/10/wreath-flowers-western-australia.html
And another with the name: Leschenaultia macrantha
http://gardendrum.com/2014/08/29/the-hunt-for-red-wreath-flowers-a-wa-treasure/
50
Thanks for the links. Those flowers are wonderful. I loved WA when we went there but that’s some time ago now. We did hike around King’s Park and went down to Margaret River for a few days and also to the Pinnacles, visiting some stromatolites on the way back. It is such a huge place…so much more to see if the time, energy and money were all available!
30
As I have pointed out on another site, it is curious how all the benefits that we see of global warming are really hiding the terrors – decreased weather extremes? Ah, but what is happening is affecting more people more seriously (seriously?)… Fewer cold-related deaths (down from 50,000 to 30,000? – pah! Only 40%!)? Ah, but heat-related deaths have soared! (up from 100 to 200? – that’s 100%! Don’t panic!)… increased arable area? Ah, but that is just leading to more rapid soil depletion… Increased greening? Ah, but that is only of the leaf area, not crop yield… Increased crop yield? Ah, but that is not as nutritious…
Whatever benefit of a slightly warmer world that is obvious to almost everyone, there will always be a climastrologist given voice to tell us that it really is a disaster happening.
120
Happy to continue Jo’s theme of the high-priests of climate getting it wrong, plus this other story has an extra double-standard in publishing to enhance the humour.
In March this year an article published in no less than Nature Climate Change had studied trends in extreme rainfall and reached the entirely predictable conclusion-du-jour:
Yes that darn global warming was manifesting itself in greater extreme rainfall events and consequent flooding in the dry regions unprepared for it, and the model projection of course was more warming ergo more flooding for the rest of the century.
Of course this news was announced all around the world, from our ABC to Reuters and the Huffington Post.
Would you like to guess if this is “settled science”. 😉
Just last week a reply paper appeared which trashes these prognostications of watery doom:
Despite increases in total global rainfall, the dry regions are… in fact… still dry! To find otherwise took cherrypicking and loose definitions.
Adding insult to injury is their final admonition:
In other words, stop telling porkies! Is this the canary in the coal mine for Cli-Sci con-men? Have the up-and-coming scientists begun to fight against the shrill nonsense that passes for science in some quarters? One can only hope.
Speaking of science communication, have you spotted the double standard? It is traditional in science publication that any critique or reply to a published paper should also be published in the same journal. When you’re sounding the alarm for global warming you get the Nature Climate Change red carpet treatment. But when you’re exposing the climate priesthood as purveyors of spurious alarmism, the premium door to Nature Climate Change is closed to you and the commodity pre-publication repository of Arxiv is your lot in life. ‘No falsification, thanks, we only have settled science here.’
From where did the authors of the cherrypicked study hail? You’d be forgiven for assuming they were 2nd-rate students from a 3rd-rate university in some backwater nation in the 3rd world. Well the way the politicians are taking us we might just end up like that. But no, aside from one chap from the prestigious MIT in the USA, the majority of authors and the lead author of the study were all half-baked down under:
The University of new South Wales’ own ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
Lead author Dr Donat received his PhD in 2010 and has published over 43 peer-reviewed papers since.
And the lead author of the skeptical reply that handed them all their hat? Sebastian Sippel, a student at Max Planck who hasn’t even finished his PhD yet.
Centre of Excellence? ROFL. Pull the other one!
140
Not only have the yields increased but the amount of land used in agriculture have declined since 1997.
50
Crop yields the opposite of crop models. They definitely get a A for consistency.
50
Should have been “an A” for consistency.
40
“already slowing wheat gains”
Note that “gains” is not the same as plantings and harvest, that is, “wheat crop.”
Farmers, seed producers, bankers and others make many thousands of decisions (choices) each year and the wheat, or corn, or beans, or sunflower harvests respond. These decisions have to do with what the people think they need to do to ‘not lose money’ during the coming year. A 1 degree potential rise or drop in average temperature in the future is not a compelling issue.
Tangent here: A driverless tractor:
http://www.agweb.com/article/driverless-tractors-officially-no-longer-futuristic-naa-ben-potter/
40
I am old enough to remember when the US sold wheat to the USSR and Jimmy Carter imposed the grain embargo that hurt many US farmers.
We can learn something else from this is the one thing communism/collectivism produces are shortages in abundance. Venezuela now serves as an example.
60
“world standing to lose six percent of its wheat crop for every degree Celsius that the annual global temperature increases.”
The post does not dispute this projection. To make a meaningful comparison there has to be a baseline to compare it to.
411
“world standing to lose six percent of its wheat crop for every degree Celsius that the annual global temperature increases.”
. . .
In a greenhouse, carbon (sic) is added.
Also, greenhouses don’t have oceans to store missing heat.
102
I’ve often asked you to provide a baseline for ‘normal’ climate, but you are yet to respond with anything resembling even a vague understanding of the most basic of scientific principles. You are, however, extremely good at reproducing keywords and repeating phrases without having the need to actually think about what you are saying, which is probably a useful skill somewhere in the world.
Again I ask you, where is the cut-off between natural variability and human influence? If we were to imagine that the industrial revolution never happened, what should the climate be doing now? What should CO2 levels be doing now? How do you set the climate baseline?
93
I was thinking of replying to Harry Twinotter above but have decided he is far too shallow intellectually and in his knowledge base to bother with any reply.
82
ROM,
“I was thinking of replying to Harry Twinotter..”
Bring it!
13
James Murphy.
“I’ve often asked you to provide a baseline for ‘normal’ climate,..”
If you were referring to temperature, I am sure I would have provided a reference to a historical reconstruction. Or maybe I didn’t bother, they are not difficult to find.
Anyway I am happy they have had a good combination of growing weather, food riots are no fun. Things must have been grim in 2002-2004, 2006-2007 and 2012-2013. Perhaps acreage under cultivation was increased in response to those events.
12
Acreage under cultivation has decreased, and growing conditions are absolutely fabulous, as shown by worldwide high yields.
Facts hurt you, don’t they twotter. 😉
52
“I am sure I would have provided a reference to a historical reconstruction.”
of the first 3/4 of the Holocene 🙂
Still a way to go, twotter, because we have only partially climbed out of the coldest period in the last 10,000 years.
52
Too much wheat on OZ? Make more Beer! Or, plant Barley/corn, and make Whiskey!
50
Give this man a drink, Huzzah!
50
This is a really stupid non-experiment:
Future [Global Warming] field test doesn’t make Earth greener
Reality:
NASA. April 2016: Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds
51
‘European wheat production areas have to prepare for greater harvest losses in the future when global warming will lead to increased drought and heat waves in southern Europe, and wet and cool conditions in the north, especially at the time of sowing, researchers warn. More frequent extreme weather conditions in Europe also threaten global food security since it produces almost a third of the world’s wheat.’
Science Daily 2014
World food security is not threatened because Europe has a predictable 20 year damp cycle, which saw hundreds of thousands die from starvation in the past. Going forward I see plenty of opportunities for Australian wheat exports to the UK.
Its also important to recognise that southern Europe will become drier overall as the world slips into a moderately cooler regime.
22
Here is a summary report on the enormous social cost of lock-step, consensus science: http://www.journalijar.com/article/11650/neutron-repulsion–social-costs-from-overlooking-this-power/
23
Hooray for fake Indian Journals. How much was the publication fee?
21
The slope of the line across the top of Figure 2 shows the bias in the Bethe-Weizsacker definition of nuclear “binding energy.”
If the slope were zero (0), there would be no bias, and nuclear “binding energies” would be as valid as Aston’s nuclear “packing fractions.”
The bias in Bethe-Weizsacker’s definition of nuclear “binding energy” obscured neutron repulsion, the source of energy represented by blue dots at every mass number in Figure 3.
Neutron repulsion is the source of energy that powers the Sun’s pulsar core: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5633/abs/270159a0.html
20
If the slope of the baseline that Weizsacker (1935) and Bethe (1936) used to calculate nuclear binding energies had been zero (0), neutron repulsion would have been common knowledge today and society would know Earth’s climate and human destiny depend totally on the Sun’s pulsar core.
00
Did you think I wanted to discuss your paid advertisement for your unsupported theory?
00
You wanna see some “Doomsday Global Warming” when carbon (sic) was at ‘safe’ levels?
~ ~ ~
Evidence of 9,000-year-old stone houses found on Australian island
“Archeologists working on the Dampier archipelago off Australia’s north-west coast have found evidence of stone houses dating back 9,000 years – to the end of the last ice age – building the case for the area to get a world heritage listing.
“Around 8,000 years ago, it would have been on the coast,” McDonald told Guardian Australia.
“This is the time that the islands were starting to be cut off and it’s a time when people were starting to rearrange themselves.”
The sea level on Australia’s north-west coast rose 130 metres after the end of the ice age, at a rate of about a metre every five to 10 years.
“In people’s lifetimes they would have seen loss of territory and would have had to renegotiate – a bit like Miami these days,” McDonald said.”
. . .
[Global Warming} Is Already Here, Says Massive Government Report
Of course sea levels aren’t rising at “a metre every five to 10 years” now, so Global Warming is not already here.
“a bit like Miami these days,” McDonald said.”
Miami’s 10 Most Expensive Homes
Miami is one of America’s premier cities with beautiful beaches, restaurants, nightlife, and luxury homes.
Scroll down and browse the most luxurious and expensive real estate in the Miami area.
31
I wonder about aboriginal stone houses. Really, that’s most unlikely. The only logic is that only the aborigines were here, so they must be aboriginal. The same with cave paintings showing boats.
The common narrative is that the stone age aborigines were wonderful carers for the land. The clear evidence is that the megafauna died out within a thousand years of their arrival and that the rainfall suddenly halved, presumably as the ground cover was destroyed. Even Tim Flannery agrees with the first. Massive man made climate change through devastating fires, the opposite of caring. Also as hunter gatherers defending territory they would have attacked any visitors, groups of people who tried to settle, much as the Mongols did to 1/3 of Europe, nomadic people versus agricultural. It is more likely the houses probably belonged to immigrant farming populations who were wiped out.
However the manufacturers of the aboriginal myths will insist that they are aboriginal houses in happy peaceful aboriginal communities where people sat around the campfires and were really farmers. There is a huge aboriginal industry and it funds many non aboriginals at billions of dollars in taxpayer expense, much as the windmill and solar industries and climate industries. There is little evidence aborigines are better off for all the billions. The stories of happy communities are based on myths. You are not allowed challenge the myths, simply as so many people now depend on them for their incomes. You will be called racist or a denier.
72
I have taken time to research the life of Australian Aborigines and that they were of many tribes and their behaviour was directly related to the area tribal lands covered. And therefore dwellings or no dwellings or shelters, caves and even rock walled huts in colder areas. They were not farmers in the European tradition but they did care for bush tucker sources and replant to make gathering more convenient to camp sites. They also used fire to manage the land, make it easier to travel through, safer and even to encourage native grasses to grow to collect seed and to attract animals that were closer for hunting purposes. They used fish traps along the coasts, even inland on rivers, they dug wells, they blocked creeks to trap fish, they were resourceful.
And they probably brought seeds here and planted them around 130,000 years ago, around the time that the vegetation changed. They used fire and based upon traditional burning and seasons. In fact the same ancient knowledge is being applied today in the Kimberly Region of WA and in other northern areas, NT, etc. National Parks & Wildlife are combining modern methods with traditional to better manage the land.
And no doubt the Aborigines had children by other ethnic group people who visited from PNG, and other places.
Evidence of land management can he seen at Art Galleries where early white settler paintings and drawings, diaries and other descriptive materials are on display. The colonisers, not all of them, worked hard to downplay the intelligence and ingenuity of the Aborigine people.
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By the way, I do not refer to modern day descendants of the Australian Aborigines who in my opinion should be Australians like all citizens should be known. And I acknowledge the problems these people too often have that are difficult to deal with. But their plight should not be a basis for judging their ancestors.
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Fire can also be used for hunting, driving animals from shelter. This was a practice now called fire stick farming, for example. It certainly changed the landscape and there are caves full of bones from megafauna from that same time, marsupials which had inhabited the country for millions of years.
You also have to wonder if the original vegetation could be reestablished and this in turn would reestablish the rainfall. It is worth trying and you can see how the Australian desert blooms with the slightest rain. I have not found this to be the case in North America. Dry desert just gets wet. You can see it around dams in Arizona and Nevada where the verges are not green as they are in Australia. Clearly Australia was recently much greener.
The idea that stone age peoples have any idea of the long term impact they have had on the landscape is unfounded. The key to agriculture and feeding great numbers of people in limited land was the growing of grasses and harvesting and grinding seeds into bread. There is no evidence of this. Only this allows hunters to settle.
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https://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/management/fire/fire-and-the-environment/41-traditional-aboriginal-burning
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http://www.anbg.gov.au/gardens/visiting/exploring/aboriginal-trail/
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Moderation, why?
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Huh. North American deserts do bloom, and sometimes spectacularly. Even Death Valley in the US blooms when enough rain has fallen
http://www.scientificamerican.com/video/death-valley-super-bloom-is-a-rare-desert-wildflower-show/
And the Atacama in Chile
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/chile-atacama-desert-flower-bloom-rare-rain/53247476
Sonoran Desert in Arizonia
http://www.gatewaytosedona.com/tours-attractions-things-to-do/travels-with-ernie/south-of-sedona/132-visitors-enjoy-spring-wildflowers-of-the-sonoran-desert
Here – http://www.desertusa.com/wildflo/wildupdates.html
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Do you have source for that age, Dennis? I was taught that they Aborigines arrived in Australia less than 60,000 years ago.
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Yes, even 60,000 years is hard to credit. Perhaps someone can throw up a link to a credible paper demonstrating that timing; every time I hunt for something like that, it seems to dissolve into the mindset of not offending the dreamtime notion of “We were always here”.
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There are lots of articles over the years in National Geographic showing three major migrations. The first was 70,00 years ago largely to the Middle East, the ‘Fertile Crescent’. Then 50,000 years ago, with migrations which reached China, India and Japan 40,000 years ago. The three migrations to the Americas over the land bridge.
The combination of genetic tracers and hard acheological evidence was amazing in a National Geographic article, where the pattern of gene inheritance demonstrated the dilution of genes in each of the migrations. Amazing stuff. For Australia, the aborigines were really among the first people out of Africa, like the people from Kerala in SW India who are traceable genetically to the first peoples.
The big change was the discovery of so much in the Fertile Crescent, agriculture, the burnt stick (Prof Geoffrey Blainey’s favorite) and the wheel. They changed the world. The earlier migrations missed out on this major revolution in human existence but at least they had the gift of fire.
So now in fifty years, we have people saying the world is changing rapidly? No, our human existence has always changed but now we are very aware of the need to coeexist with the environment and limited resources like fossil fuel. This does not mean stopping everything, but to be aware of limited resources, limited CO2 and the threat of a terrible ice age. The people against everything just want life, evolution, changes to stop, as if that will fix anything? The UN just wants cash, like the EU who want to tax Apple $11Bn simply because of attitudes, not the law or fairness.
The worst are Monckton’s profiteers of doom who say we are all going to drown and then buy property on the waterfront. Not mentioning names here.
Despite the the fact that the articles of National Geographic are extreme warmist, the people are simply passionate and the articles are fantastic. You can read the facts, even through the warmist nonsense. It is tragic how so many really good people are pushed into this idea that man is destroying the universe, when in fact it is just the story of evolution of a species. I am sure the dinosaurs had no journalists criticizing their behaviour and only an asteroid could stop their total dominance of a fertile planet.
As for the rapid growth of the food supply. How lucky is that?
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Analitik my understanding is that Mungo Man remains date back to around 50,000 years however in more recent times I have read suggestions that the early Australian Aborigines could have been here around 130,000 years.
http://www.anthropologysocietysa.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/JASSA-Volume-22_7-Ford.pdf
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There is nothing in the archaeology that suggests that it is “aboriginal”.What civilisation? Who knows.
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Handjive, interesting idea about the stone houses. But the sea-level rise story seems frankly bizarre unless there is some more local info.
About 8000 years ago sea levels were peaking around most places in Australia.
The phenomenal rise of 130m occurred over 10,000 years. Though there is one particularly steep part circa 14500 ya. She has some magical proxy accurate to single years 8k ya.?
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Lovely data. Clearly 120 metres or more of well documented sea level rise wholly due to increased CO2, the only reason seas rise.
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Mods; On reflection you might have to can my comment @ #36.2.1.1 which is in moderation.
Or “can” most of it because of a possible section 18C problem which as we know, is only used when white skinned european origin and heterosexual persons are the claimed perpetrators for some personal offence being taken .
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The circular stone foundations may have been built by early Harappan from India. We know they migrated to Australia around 4,300 years ago, so I’m stretching my imagination.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Indus-era-8000-years-old-not-5500-ended-because-of-weaker-monsoon/articleshow/52485332.cms
Its highly unlikely that hunter gatherers could have conceived the idea.
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The same MO as the later Harappan migration.
Abrupt weakening of the Indian summer monsoon at 8.2 kyr B.P.
Yama Dixita et al
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el gordo; A bit of my post that is in moderation;
————
“the Old Men and custodians of aboriginal lore of the local aboriginal tribes in the NW of WA apparently repeatedly told the discovers of the very sophisticated Bradshaw rock paintings that “they are not ours”!
Which raises some red flags for myself about the claims that those “stone houses” [ ? ] were supposedly built by the early aboriginal inhabitants of the region.
And I wonder how many know of the now extinct North Queensland’s aboriginal pygmy tribes
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In the day Lake Carpentaria would have been a mingling of new migrants encroaching on those of earlier epochs and the Holocene cut some of them off.
In the Pilbara region of WA there are traces of human habitation 46,000 years BP, Dampier called them the most miserable people in the world. They didn’t invent the wheel or could possibly have the slightest interest in building a circular home.
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“The shift to a more sustainable global economy will be ***the most capital intensive transition in human history”:
5 Sept: BusinessGreen: James Murray: G20 vows to scale up green financing in pursuit of ‘cleaner energy future and sustainable energy security’
Communique underlines group’s commitment to Paris Agreement, but disappoints campaigners with failure to set fossil fuel subsidy deadline
The G20 has today signalled its backing for a wave of green finance reforms designed to mobilise trillions of dollars in low carbon infrastructure and technology investment…
“We believe efforts could be made to provide clear strategic policy signals and frameworks, promote voluntary principles for green finance, expand learning networks for capacity building, support the development of local green bond markets, promote international collaboration to facilitate cross-border investment in green bonds, encourage and facilitate knowledge sharing on environmental and financial risks, and improve the measurement of green finance activities and their impacts,” the communique said…
But the communique stopped short of setting a goal to ensure ratification is delivered before the end of 2016….
Indian media reported the Indian delegation had opposed proposals to set a clear target date for ratification of this year…
However, China and the US are understood to have stepped up calls for a number of countries to ratify the agreement as soon as possible and a series of announcements are now expected later this month, taking the tally of countries formally adopting the agreement closer to the key threshold of 55 nations representing 55 per cent of global emissions that will see it come into force…
Jill Duggan, director of the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group, said the summit provided further evidence the world’s largest economies were keen to build on the progress delivered by the Paris Agreement…
The focus on mobilising green finance was also welcomed by Ben Caldecott, director of the sustainable finance programme at the University of Oxford Smith School. “The shift to a more sustainable global economy will be ***the most capital intensive transition in human history,” he said. “The G20 is right to focus on how to mobilise the finance required, and we warmly welcome the work produced jointly by the Bank of England and the People’s Bank of China on green finance. It is important that this work accelerates under the G20 in Germany.”…
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2469808/g20-vows-to-scale-up-green-financing-in-pursuit-of-cleaner-energy-future-and-sustainable-energy-security
PDF: 9 pages: G20 Leaders’ Communique Hangzhou Summit
More Effective and Efficient Global Economic and Financial Governance
https://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/_Anlagen/G8_G20/2016-09-04-g20-kommunique-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=3
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4 Sept: Financial Times: Pilita Clark: Green fund investing in the wrong projects, says former chief
A $10bn funding body central to the Paris climate change accord has been saddled with cumbersome board rules that mean it has backed the wrong sort of projects, its former executive director has warned.
The Green Climate Fund in South Korea’s planned city of Songdo has also been struggling to attract staff to a location that is “not very cosmopolitan or expat-oriented”, said Héla Cheikhrouhou, who has just stepped down from the organisation…
The fund was set up in late 2011…
The Green Climate Fund, to which the US, the UK, Germany and other developed nations have contributed, is supposed to bolster the agreement by channelling billions of dollars from richer nations to help poorer countries cut their emissions and deal with the impact of global warming.
It has so far approved $424m of funds for 17 projects, including a wetlands resilience effort in Peru and a water supply venture in Fiji…
But Ms Cheikhrouhou, a former investment banker who has just returned to her home country of Tunisia, where she has become energy minister, said the fund was not supporting the transformative projects it was supposed to be backing.
“Some of these projects [which have been approved], of course they are good for the development of the country, but they are not paradigm-shifting, game-changing types of projects,” she told the Financial Times in an interview.
“We are getting rather business-as-usual types of investment proposals and these are getting approved by the board,” she said. ***“There is no project that has been rejected.”…
Part of the problem lay in voting rules requiring consensus on every decision made by the fund’s board of 24 members, drawn from developed and developing countries.
That meant all decisions became “a compromise-making process”, said Ms Cheikhrouhou…
“Normally for financial entities you would always have an agreed type of majority for decision-making in the absence of consensus.”…
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/13b5654a-7142-11e6-9ac1-1055824ca907.html#axzz4JQyRcCM2
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Are the less-developed nations going to realize, soon, that the “business-as-usual” still applies, and will apply in the future? I remember the idea of paying some countries to remain undeveloped, as eco-tourism havens, rather than allowing them to enter the “modern” age of self reliant industrialization and power production. And it sounds like this what is going on here – wetlands resilience in Peru, which, granted, has very dry coastline (but contains a ranforest) is not modern tech or the means to achieve it. And while all islands need a source of fresh water, the idea of developing is meant to allow these places, like Fiji, to become developed and industrial and able to do more than “venture” water supply, yes?
The colonialism and patriarchy of old is still alive and well in the “modern” UN and its agencies, it seems.
01
sea-sick?
6 Sept: Japan Times: AFP/JIJI: Global scientists warn human-caused warming making oceans sick, threatening food security
HONOLULU – Global warming is making the oceans sicker than ever before, spreading disease among animals and humans and threatening food security across the planet, a major scientific report said on Monday.
The findings, based on peer-reviewed research, were compiled by 80 scientists from 12 countries, experts said at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress in Hawaii.
“We all know that the oceans sustain this planet. We all know that the oceans provide every second breath we take,” IUCN Director General Inger Andersen told reporters at the meeting, which has drawn 9,000 leaders and environmentalists to Honolulu.
“And yet we are making the oceans sick.”
The report, “Explaining Ocean Warming,” is the “most comprehensive, most systematic study we have ever undertaken on the consequence of this warming on the ocean,” one of the lead authors, Dan Laffoley, said.
The world’s waters have absorbed more than 93 percent of the enhanced heating from climate change since the 1970s, curbing the heat felt on land but drastically altering the rhythm of life in the ocean, he said…
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/09/06/world/science-health-world/global-scientists-warn-human-caused-warming-making-oceans-sick-threatening-food-security/
IUCN Library: Explaining ocean warming
Complete Title: Explaining ocean warming : causes, scale, effects and consequences
Download (19.29 MB)
https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/46254
5 Sept: National Geographic: Christine Dell’Amore: The Oceans Can’t Protect Us Anymore—Here’s Why
Our waters have borne the brunt of global warming for decades, but dying corals, extreme weather, and plummeting fish stocks are signs that it can handle no more.
HONOLULU, HAWAII—The oceans, which have borne the brunt of most of global warming, have finally hit their limit as dying corals and plummeting fish stocks signal that the seas are at a dangerous tipping point, according to the broadest ever look at the issue. And people are already experiencing direct consequences, such as more extreme weather events, including hurricanes, says the report, released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“We all know the oceans sustain this planet,” says Inger Andersen, IUCN’s director general, “yet we are making the oceans sick.”…
So “how are we going to stop going to hell in a handbasket?” asks Greg Stone, executive vice president at the nonprofit organization Conservation International and a marine expert.
He suggests treating the ocean like a sick patient that has a temperature…
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/oceans-warming-global-environment-climate/
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“He suggests treating the ocean like a sick patient that has a temperature…”
Give it some aspirin and chicken soup? How much would it take?
Also in headlines – the oceans are so HOT we are doomed! Hottest EVAH! I guess the temp is beyond aspirin. Paracetamol/Tylenol, anyone?
How can they tell? Has anyone ever actually gotten a realistic measure – even estimate – of total ocean temp? All the depths, under-ice, surface? Sheesh.
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comment #39 is in moderation…the latest MSM big scare.
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6 Sept: AAP: Call to boost Pacific climate funding
Oxfam Australia is calling on the Australian government to commit to a target of $3.2 billion in private and public funding to help poorer nations mitigate global warming by 2020.
The federal government allocates $200 million each year to climate finance, but didn’t increase its contributions alongside other countries at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris last year.
The $200 million comes from the existing foreign aid budget.
An Oxfam report analysing climate finance in the Pacific Islands – which are on the frontline of global warming – called for urgent action through 50 recommendations, including improving access to the global Green Climate Fund.
Australia pledged to improve access when elected to lead the Green Climate Fund in 2016 and Oxfam Australia acknowledged the government had been proactive on that promise…
“As a wealthy nation and one of the biggest countries in the region, Australia has a particular responsibility to support its vulnerable neighbours in the Pacific.”
The report also calls for a phase out of fossil-fuel subsidies.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/32538874/call-to-boost-pacific-climate-funding/#page1
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ie… Oxfam wants to increase their executive salaries to $2M a year !
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each! for 100 executives.
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Being an executive in a tax free “Feel Good” industry and getting to spend “Other Peoples Money” by the bucket load without ever being held accountable for how it is spent and where it is spent must be exciting and it seems it sure pays as well!
Pity that they didn’t hire just one single experienced engineering executive and tell him to build a small Ultra critical coal fired power station and a basic grid in some backwater somewhere where it would double and triple the standards of living for hundreds of thousands within a decade or so.
No publicity in that of course and greenpeace and the WWF and etc would have both Oxfam and that engineer’s vitals on toast for daring to use coal as a source of power to lift those tens of thousands out of abject poverty.
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The engineers working on the Lake Erie windmill have been reaping millions – and have yet to produce working plans. I guess the storms on the lake are so bad (due to climate change!) that they haven’t figured out how to even build a base yet.
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/12/lake_erie_wind_farm_blows_away.html
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/05/cleveland_wind_project_awarded.html
Here’s the group trying to make it all work – http://www.leedco.org/
And check out the link in the left corner – giant suction cup power.
Engineers can be just as greedy as the rest, I guess.
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OT but interesting, Missing comet lander Philae spotted at last: ESA
That’s one tough washing machine!
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The delegation to the Copenhagen Conference from China spoke about 3,600 years of civilisation in China and three periods of warmer than the present global warming recorded and each was a period of increased prosperity from improved crop yields.
The last natural Earth Cycle of warming that we now know ended in 1998.
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Is it my old Mac or has the icons script dropped out of the server as I am only getting a very few odd commenter’s icons loading at present.
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No icons here either, Rom.
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Ditto
10
Ditto
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Ditto, running Windows 8.1, Google Chrome.
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My guess is that Gravatar server has issues.
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6 Sept: SMH: Peter Hannam: Australia’s marine parks under threat after review, environment groups say
The results of two lengthy panels (LINK) set up by the Abbott government to review huge new marine reserves set up by then prime minister Julia Gillard in 2012 recommend changes to zoning use and boundaries for 26 of the 40 areas…
Michelle Grady, oceans director for the Pew environmental group in Australia, said the reports threaten to expose vulnerable areas to commercial fishing if the recommendations were accepted…
Fiona Maxwell, a campaign manager for the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said the reports ignored the science and could trigger a devastating loss of threatened marine life…
The marine parks reviews also come as the International Union for Conservation and Nature released a major study on ocean warming…
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/australias-marine-parks-under-threat-after-review-environment-groups-say-20160905-gr912v.html
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5 Sept: HuffPo: Chris D’Angelo: The ‘Father of Biodiversity’ fears Trump and Nuclear War more than Climate Change
Famed Conservationist E.O. Wilson says climate change is a threat. But he also worries about the Republican nominee and people with nuclear codes.
Wilson now advocates for setting aside half the Earth’s surface for nature so that it can remain undisturbed by humans. It was the subject of his latest book, Half-Earth, and his address to the IUCN World Conservation Congress…
(AS WITH EVERY HUFFPO ARTICLE THAT MENTIONS TRUMP, THERE IS THE MOST DEFAMATORY “EDITORS’ NOTE” AT THE END OF THE PIECE)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/eo-wilson-fears-trump-nuclear-war_us_57ca5511e4b0e60d31df4634
CAGW psycho-babblers are always going on about cognitive dissonance, but E.O. Wilson surely wins FIRST PRIZE on that score. who could be scarier than current, gaffe-prone VP, Joe Biden when it comes to the NUCLEAR CODES?
1 Sept: Washington Free Beacon: David Rutz: Biden Again Points Out Military Aide Carrying Nuclear Codes at Clinton Rally
Vice President Joe Biden repeated a gaffe from last month on Thursday when he pointed out the military aide who travels with him carrying the nuclear launch codes…
“He (Trump) has no idea what the hell he’s talking about, and guess what? That’s OK sometimes … But I’ve got a military aide with me carrying a briefcase,” Biden said, pointing to his left. “No, I mean this sincerely. That briefcase has the nuclear codes in it and, God forbid, if something happened to the president and a decision had to be made, I open it up and the nuclear codes are there. Just imagine giving this guy access.”
The crowd laughed, and Biden grew stern…
He did the same thing last month during his first appearance alongside Clinton:
…“There’s a guy who follows me, right back here,” Biden said, pointing behind him to the right, “has the nuclear codes, so God forbid anything ever happened to the president and I had to make a decision, the codes are with — he (Trump) is not qualified to know the code! He can’t be trusted!”…
16 Aug: CNS News: Susan Jones: Biden Says Trump Can’t Be Trusted With Nuclear Codes, Then Tells Crowd He Has the Codes ‘Right Back Here’
5 Sept: Newsweek: Flying Under the Radar, Hillary the Hawk
By Christopher A. Preble
A number of outspoken hawks have praised Hillary Clinton’s approach to foreign policy over the past few months, with at least one stepping up to raise funds for her campaign.
This might be surprising if one assumes that hawks tend to support Republicans…
It is not surprising that hawks prefer Clinton over Trump, however, if you realize that Hillary Clinton supported every one of the last seven U.S. military interventions abroad, plus two others we ended up not fighting…
For much of her career, Hillary Clinton has been one of the most hawkish Democrats in Washington, and one of the more hawkish American politicians, period (my Cato colleague Caroline Dorminey helped compile an early report card here).
Clinton has supported the use of the U.S. military for a range of issues, not simply or primarily to advance U.S. national interests, but also to defend the security of other countries and pursue humanitarian objectives…
even anti-Trump Vox had to note Trump’s anti-interventionist stance:
Dec 2015: Vox: Andrew Prokop: Donald Trump issued a remarkably blunt denunciation of the Iraq War during the debate
Trump: “We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that, frankly, if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems — our airports and all the other problems we have — we would have been a lot better off, I can tell you that right now.
We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East — we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away — and for what? It’s not like we had victory. It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the 4 trillion dollars or 5 trillion dollars. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!”…
As Matt Yglesias pointed out on Tuesday, this, like much of what Trump says, exists outside the bounds of normal political discourse. Even for Democrats who criticize the Iraq War, it’s considered gauche to say that so many veterans died and were injured for nothing (though many likely believe this in their hearts)…
And here again, he may come off to voters as more honest and straight-talking than the other candidates…
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btw for conservatives who might know of Phyllis Schlafly (conservative icon in the US who died Monday aged 92), there are some obits/links in jo’s Unthreaded thread, plus some other stuff – BBC propaganda on Paris Agreement/Brexit, etc.
10
Some of that bumper crop should be stored away for future bad years.
Mmmm…. Where have I read that before….??
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I just got back from Esperance, East of Albany, WA and the word from there all the way up the mallee district to my home town of Salmon Gums, is that its the best year ever..so far. It will only take a good frost to undo it though. Cheers.
10
Soros’s pawns:
6 Sept: Breitbart: Liam Deacon: VIDEO: Black Lives Matter Shut Down London Airport Because ‘Climate Change Is Racist’
“This action was taken in order to highlight the UK’s environmental impact on the lives of black people locally and globally,” declared the group in a statement. “By 2050 there will be 200 million climate refugees. Black people are the first to die, not the first to fly, in this racist climate crisis.”…
Speaking on the telephone, BLM activist Alex told Sky News live that, “We are in total conversation with the people who created the movement in the U.S…they are in full support and when they wake up in a few hours they will release a statement saying that.”
She also said that “climate change is a race issue” and said pollution is racist because it gives black people “asthma and skin conditions”…
Several of the leaders of BLM UK went to Oxford University, one of the most prestigious institutions in the world…
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/09/06/video-black-lives-matter-shutdown-london-airport-climate-change-racist/
CAGW-infested MSM is loving it:
6 Sept: SkyNews: What Is Black Lives Matter Fighting For In UK?
The Black Lives Matter movement, ***which has inspired the support of celebrities including Beyonce, is making its mark in Britain
Campaigners said Tuesday’s action at London City Airport was taken “in order to highlight the UK’s environmental impact on the lives of black people locally and globally”…
http://news.sky.com/story/why-black-lives-matter-is-active-in-the-uk-10567069
6 Sept: HuffPo: Aubrey Allegretti: Black Lives Matter Protesters Ground All Flights At London City Airport
Hundreds of passengers have been stranded…
The BLM group said it had been occupying the tarmac to “protest the UK’s environmental impact on black people”…
“Black people are the first to die, not the first to fly, in this racist climate crisis,” a statement released by the group to coincide with their action said…
Today’s protest coincides with news research released today that shows tiny particles breathed in through air pollution could be linked to diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Experts have discovered the presence of magnetic nanoparticles, which have previously been associated with the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, in the human brain.
The shape and features of the nanoparticles suggest they are likely to have come from an outside source, possibly air pollution, the Press Association reported.
BLM released a video immediately after storming the runway at City Airport. Watch it below…
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/london-city-airport-black-lives-matter-protest_uk_57ce770fe4b09f5b5e375d7d?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D-194843736_uk
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Traced the nanoparticles back to http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/08/31/1605941113
I haven’t the chops to determine how full of hooey this is, or isn’t.
Nor the subscription to Pnas to even see what is beyond the abstract.
00
6 Sept: UK Daily Mail: ‘Climate change is racist’: Black Lives Matter protesters storm the runway at London City Airport after reaching the tarmac in a DINGHY – bringing flights to a standstill
Police spent hours ‘negotiating’ with protesters who were finally removed from the runway after six hours
By Steph Cockroft and Emma Glanfield
Michael Twomey, who was due to fly to Malaga from the airport this morning, told MailOnline that passengers were baffled as to how the situation was taking so long to resolve.
‘I am sitting at City airport delayed with hundreds of other people. We are all asking the same questions, how can it take this long to remove a few people?’ he said.
‘Why are we giving these ridiculous group of individuals the exposure they clearly desire? ‘
Mr Twomey, who works in maintenance in the building industry, added that the reasons for the protest are ‘ridiculous’…
Scotland Yard had insisted they had to wait for specialist teams before taking action…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3775517/Protesters-storm-runway-London-City-Airport-bringing-flights-standstill-stranding-thousands-passengers.html
at least Mashable more appropriately adds “ALLIED TO” to the headline:
6 Sept: Mashable: Lindsay Davis: Activists allied with Black Lives Matter shut down London airport to protest climate change
The Guardian reports that a spokeswoman for BLMUK has confirmed that all nine of the protestors locked together are white, inviting criticism from some that these protestors are “appropriating someone else’s struggle.”…
READ THE TWEETS
http://mashable.com/2016/09/06/black-lives-matter-shuts-down-airport/
will the outrage go viral? in this case, probably not.
10
Globally we may be at an all time high for wheat production but take a look at China this year. The Govt has stamped on media reporting of their massive floods and the prognosis is for further torrential rains in the region. Their agricultural losses this year will cause them food supply problems for 2017. As we enter the Solar Minimum we will see more erratic jet-streaming with major wheat producers being hit with late frosts in spring and early rains in autumn.
You don’t need a degree or a fancy computer model to see that we are heading into a period of agricultural difficulty similar to the early 1800s.
13
Its not easy to spot the solar signal amidst the noise.
After Tambora
‘China, Europe, and North America all had well-documented cases of abnormal temperatures, devastating their harvests. These climatic shifts also altered the monsoon season in China and India, forcing thousands of Chinese to flee coastal areas due to regional flooding of the Yangtze Valley.’ wiki
02
This appears to be the solar signal.
“During the last 500 years, apparent climate fluctuations were experienced, including two cold phases from the 1470s to the 1710s and the 1790s to the 1860s, two warm phases from the 1720s to the 1780s, and after the 1870s. The temperature variations prior to the 1500s show two anomalous warm peaks, around 300 and between approximately 1100 and 1200, that exceed the warm level of the last decades of the 20th century.”
Ge,Q. et al
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Bumper wheat crops worldwide force prices down.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/wheat-prices.png
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Has anyone besides me found it hilarious how our “alarmist friends” have jumped all over the satellite data for “the hottest year on record” while totally dissing satellite data when it said there was a 19 year pause? Or are there a different set of satellites now and that’s why its okay to use them?
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The ABC is informing us that Australia has completed the wettest winter on record. There are no alarming comments about this from the govts. Climate advisory group. So different from 2009 after the drought when Prof. Flannery advised the building of solar water purifiers that have yet to be used. Who would have thought we had variable weather? ( sarc)
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” . . . wheat yields are excepted decline in the near future . . .”
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This is the original from Nature.
Does nobody, anywhere, proof read their stuff these days? And how can a report with this sort of sloppiness be taken seriously?
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Yes, I saw that too. Nobody actually reads these things past the headline.
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If there is heaps in storage, it is quite likely there will be a somewhat small crop next year.
Nothing to do with yields or climate, though.
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